This invention relates to skin and fascia staplers, and particularly to a surgical stapler that provides an improved method of counting the total number of staples that is used during a surgical procedure.
Surgical skin or fascia staplers are well known in the medical industry. Their purpose is to join dislocated skin or fascia by inserting surgical staples along the rupture to hold the adjacent portions of skin together until the patient""s natural healing processes enable the separate portions to join together. Over the years, surgeons have converted more and more to the use of surgical staples rather than conventional thread sutures for closing incisions or wounds in the skin or fascia of a patient.
Early examples of surgical staplers, such as that of U.S. Pat. No. 3,873,016 to Fishbein, issued Mar. 25, 1975, disclose a pliers-like instrument including a staple driving ram, a staple guide, and an anvil that operate from outside the severed skin. A ratchet means is provided to prevent the pliers handles from reversing or opening once a closing movement has begun. This prevents a second staple from being fed into the staple guide while the one ahead of it is still in the guide.
Early versions of surgical staplers were reusable therefore necessitating that the stapler be cleaned and disinfected when used on more than one patient. Later improvements to surgical staplers included the production of disposable models. U.S. Pat. No. 4,109,844 to Becht, issued Aug. 29, 1978 for example, discloses a surgical stapler that may be fabricated in such a way as to constitute a single-use, disposable instrument.
In the past, unfortunate incidents have occurred in the operating room where various operating devices or equipment has been left inside of the patient by mistake. In the modern-day operating room it has therefore become imperative that all operating equipment is accounted for prior to closing the operating cavity. This accounting of equipment even extends to small items such as the number of staples that have been used on a patient. U.S. Pat. No. 4,406,392 to Campbell, et al. (hereinafter the ""392 patent), issued Sep. 27, 1983 addresses this accounting issue by providing an indicator to indicate the number of staples expended. Although providing a means of accounting for the staples expended, the device of the ""392 patent provides only an analog readout. As can be imagined, since the stapler of the ""392 patent is a disposable model it is quite compact, and the gradations on the analog scale are located in quite close proximity to one another. A user must then correctly interpolate the reading between two annotated hash marks. Considering that blood or other detritus from the operating site may occlude the viewing window above the indicator, it would be very difficult for a surgeon or assistant to determine the exact number of staples expended in a given procedure.
A further disadvantage of the prior art surgical staplers includes the fact that no audible feedback has been provided to indicate when a staple has been inserted. An audible signal would improve the utility of the device by letting surgeons know when a staple has been inserted into the ruptured skin or fascia.
The present invention comprises an improved surgical stapler including a digital counter to facilitate easy and accurate accounting of the number of staples consumed during a procedure and audible feedback to indicate when an individual staple has been inserted and when the stapler is ready to form another staple. The surgical stapler is of simple construction that lends itself to low cost production and mass assembly techniques thereby enabling it to be a disposable device.